The wounded beast asks for pity
Like a wounded, blind beast Donald Trump is lashing out violently in every direction, blasting blood-curdling cries. He romps around insulting everyone, calling them monsters, slandering them as communists, slamming them as a “disaster.”
Trump calls the country’s most valuable mind amid a deadly pandemic an idiot. All of it, especially the last, reminds me of an anecdote my father related to me from the days of picaresque politics in the old Cuba. A not-so-clever politico went up to a sharp-tongued adversary and, looking at the pin on his lapel, asked: “Is that an ass?” Unfazed, the other replied: “No, it is a mirror. “
Beneath the ridiculous figure that Donald Trump cuts in the world, prompting other world leaders to laugh at his comic opera persona, a caricature of Mussolini, himself a caricature, a histrionic comic opera dictator, is pure venom.
What drives the sick and evil mind of Donald Trump? His niece, the psychologist Mary L. Trump, convincingly argues that it comes from his early years under the thumb of his father, another monstrous tyrant, from which he learned the lesson that it doesn’t matter how you play the game, being the winner is the only thing. He has followed that principle his entire life, and it is his playbook now.
Mary Trump observed through a psychological lens the genesis of a monster. Philosophers as far back as the nineteenth century understood the results for a person’s character. They described a trait they called ressentiment [a French word used mostly by German philosophers like Nietzsche and Scheler.} Ressentiment “is a self-poisoning of the mind that produces certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments primarily vengefulness, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.”
Ressentiment is a picture of Donald Trump as precise as E=mc² describes fundamental laws of the universe, decodes the relation between matter and energy revealing their equivalence at the deepest level. Ressentiment is the law of Trump’s mental and moral universe.
That mental and moral universe has produced human carnage of a world-historical magnitude. In four days, COVID-19 kills as many Americans as died on 9-11. The famous battle of Gettysburg, about which Abraham Lincoln delivered the most celebrated speech in American history, killed 7,000 on both sides. By the time of the election about a quarter of a million Americans will have died of COVID-19. This is America’s Waterloo many times over.
How is it possible that anyone, much less as many as 40 to 45 percent of the people approve of Donald Trump’s governance and plan to vote for him. What is the basis of the obstinacy and mindlessness of Trump’s base?
I think the secret lies in the culture of America’s heartland, the vast area between the coasts, which for the most part refused to take the virus seriously, denied science, defied public health measures, with some people even plotting to kill mayors and governors for governing using common sense and truly pro-life values (as opposed to false ones that celebrate capital punishment and condemn abortion). In the East and the West, where the level of education is high, and the spirit of cosmopolitanism is strong, the virus hit first and hardest. The leaders and the people saw that it was real and fought back hard, and sharply reduced the toll of the virus.
The areas in the middle were hit later, but that only explains part of the tragedy unfolding in places like South Dakota (which has the highest rate of COVID-19 now) and other states in the Midwest and the Mountain West who are being hit very hard right now.
The handwriting on the wall should have been clear. Perhaps they thought they would not be hit because they would be protected by divine grace and other delusions believed in such places more than elsewhere. Maybe they thought COVID only came for strange people with foreign customs. As a young woman in Jacksonville, Florida, told a network reporter, “that virus happens in Miami, where they drink Corona. Here we drink Budweiser.”
But the real key lies in a concept coined by another nineteenth century German philosopher to describe the mindset of peasants. It’s a mindset that is alive and well in this country today, especially in Trump territories in the South, the Midwest and the Mountain states but not only there. The “idiocy of rural life,” the philosopher called it. It consists of a “hidebound conservatism, parochialism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, ignorance, distrust, economic risk aversion and the inability to cooperate with others in collective endeavors.”
Could a better description be written today about the attitudes of Trump’s base or the stupidity of those who deny science and eschew public health on the way to the ICU? It is almost as if, in the process of evolution, the coasts and its leaders like Cuomo and Newsom retained the higher functions of the brain while those in the realm of rural idiocy have left only the reptilian brain.
That is only a metaphor (needless to say), and a nasty one. I don’t revel in the misfortune of the people so immersed in the idiocy of rural life that all else looks to them the way Mandarin script does to me. Incomprehensible. Camus wrote that most of the evil in the world is borne of ignorance. I am not sure I believe that, and even so, evil is still evil. Moreover, I think much of the ignorance is willful. I will never forget the Kansas Board of Education person saying they would never teach that “monkeys to man” theory of evolution stuff.
And what of the president, the principal author of the disaster? Lately, while not sounding belligerent he has tried to affect a touch of pathos. But this president does not deserve the feeling that flows from pathos, which is pity. Part of this last act is asking people, if I lose, what can I do, what should I do?
I have an answer. A Japanese warrior, a Samurai, an honorable man who has lost a battle he should have won but inexplicably declined even to fight it, losing a hundred of his men as a result, is irrevocably disgraced. There is only one way to recover a portion of his lost honor. Hara Kiri.
This is my answer to your question, Donald Trump, about what you should do once you have lost.
